Until the Last Breath
by corvusdraconis
Summary: AU: Severus had enough serving two Masters during the last war. Now, he just wants to be left alone and keep people at more than arm's length. He refused to change for anyone, but the war had more than changed him. It had left him with a hunger for blood. [HG/SS]


**A/N:** I've been on a horrible nagging craving for decent vampire Severus stories, and it's been driving me INSANE. (Especially considering I have APA papers to do, many tests, QSEN evals, and … oh well just throw the entire kitchen sink in there.

Anyway, my friend **Story Please** has been helping me by writing this glorious story called  Her Sanguine Heart, which you can reach using my favourites list. I recommend it. I'm stalking it. (queue creepy stalker music)

In the meantime, I started writing this, because, well, my brain won't stop pestering me, and it is not focusing on the things I keep telling it are more important!

 **Summary:** When Severus told Albus that had kept Lily in his heart "always" it been the truest thing in his life at that point. Now, with both of his "Masters" dead, he was determined to keep everything living at arm's length. He refused to change anymore than he already had for anything or anyone. Now if someone could just give his atrophied, hungry, and abused heart the memo, that would be great. [HG/SS]

 **Rating** : M for safety, because only the gods knows where I'm going with this one.

 **Disclaimer:** Harry Potter and the world of HP are owned by JKR. I am but a child playing in her sandbox, dwarfed by her shadow. Rita Skeeter is still a daft cow, and that's never going to change.

 **Beta:** Help, I'm posting unsupervised! *eyedarts* Oh, Merlin! fluffpanda caught me! AHHHHHH! *claws desk and is dragged off* Much love to fluffpanda, who keeps me in line... or at least more foc—oooSHINY!

 **Until the Last Breath**

Severus Snape had always been a survivor. Decades of being at the beck and call of the two most demanding taskmasters known to the Wizarding world had only reinforced that. Not dying to Nagini's attempt to murder him had been proof of it. Until most recently, and for Severus who measured life by decades rather than years, it had always been a lonely and solitary existence - even when surrounded in people. Severus snorted to himself. Where hundreds of annoying, imbecilic children ever to be considered 'people'? Weren't they more like lemmings that just threw themselves off nature's cliffs to drown themselves in the seas at the end of a mindless migration?

Severus had always kept people at arm's length, and few knew the real reason why. Most assumed he was an antisocial git who preferred the dungeon and his own rancor to the company of others. He led them to believe what he showed in public only because it helped him keep people from trying to get to know him better. He had never wanted anyone to get to know him better. His failed history with Lily had stamped the lesson of what happened to those he might care for, and he had done a marvelous job at mucking up his life ever since he let the word 'Mudblood' escape his lips.

That had been the true beginning of his change, really, the event with Lily. That singular moment in time had transformed the emotionally pained boy who was willing to embarrass himself by camping out in front of the Gryffindor portrait portal into the cold and seemingly emotionless, brooding adult. Her death had brought on another series of changes. He had tried to save her, even though her love for Potter had proven far greater than Severus could fathom. He had been willing to save them all, if only to make up for that one horrible loss of control that had been the final straw to his childhood friend.

Even with his need to atone for that blaring crime of his past, he had still kept people at arms length. He had still treated children like the dunderheads they only kept proving they were over and over again. He had focused his life goals, obtained his Mastership in so many more areas than potions, and yet still served two opposing Masters on their quest. He had served them both as they pit him against the other, using him as just one more tool in their arsenal for world domination. Severus made no mistake about it. Both Tom Riddle and Albus Dumbledore shared very similar goals.

The difference had always been the way each wished to be seen by others. One wished to be powerful and uncontested, superior master of people. The other wished to be looked on as a benefactor and wise companion, yet he, too, wished to be a master of people. Both manipulated the world and people around them like chess pieces. Both had visions of a greater good that seemed to make sense only in their troubled minds. In the end, both had met their end to their own devices. Albus had died to his own arrogance and inability to resist temptation. The Dark Lord had died to his arrogance in thinking he was immune to death. Both of his great and powerful Masters had succumbed to life's greatest irony: they had died, and the used, abused, and seemingly insignificant Severus Snape had lived.

Lived was a relative term for him. He had been denied death, he supposed, but he had also been denied anything resembling a normal life. He blamed Potter's hails of redemption, the proclamations of the morose potion master's true allegiance to the Light and love for his mother. It was bad enough that the incarnation of the hated James Potter exposed his true loyalties to everyone, so even now random vengeful Death Eaters tried to come and assassinate him. Harry Potter had also dragged his old flame for Lily Potter neé Evans out where everyone could… pity him.

Severus despised being pitied.

Now, Severus was either followed around by a bunch of annoying supplicants who wanted to leech of his knowledge and 'heroism,' or he was being pitied for a love he knew in his heart both one-sided and futile from the very start. They seemed to think he was still carrying around a torch for the dead woman who was married to another man. Even Harry thought that Severus' Patronus said he was still in love with his mother.

The truth was far more depressing. Lily had been the brightest hope and closest thing happiness he had had in his meager years of life. His father was a drunkard. His mother was an mistreated housewife who didn't even have the willpower to pick up her wand and leave her abusive husband. Severus had been dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes for the majority of his childhood. Lily had been a ray of light in the darkness of his world. She had been a friend, and he had loved her, but not in the way every seemed to think he did. It had pissed him off that she chose Potter and his band of misfits over their friendship, so much so that it had driven him to the Dark Lord's service in the misguided attempt to make for himself a better world. He had done exactly what Lily had said he would do. The irony, however, was it had been because of her, not Mulciber and Avery, that he had become a Death Eater.

He realised his mistake quickly and had tried to save her, her arrogant, idiot husband, and their baby son. There was a time not so long ago that Severus truly believed that Albus Dumbledore had allowed the horrible event to happen just to manipulate Severus into being at his beck and call for the following decades. Part of him still believe it, even now that the old goat was dead. Dumbledore could have been the Secret Keeper like he was with a zillion other secrets he kept close to his chest. What would have been one more? Nothing. It would have been logical, easier, and completely safer than trusting something of that magnitude to a womanizing dog of the House of Black and a two-faced scaly-tailed rat.

In the end, he had survived them too.

He had been determined to live his life free of Masters after the end of the Second Wizarding War. He had vowed to change for no one, and he had succeeded for about forty-five seconds until a hungry, nubile, newly-arisen vampire had latched onto his bleeding neck and drained him to the point of death. And since the world was full of imbeciles, both mortal and not, the new vampire had bitten his own lip with his unfamiliar fangs as he licked Severus' blood off his mouth, and some of the tainted, vampiric blood had fallen into Severus' mouth.

Severus Snape had not died. He Changed. He was a survivor, and he survived the countless nights of painful, maddening hunger of his first year. He wrestled with it, bent it to his will, and forced it into the back of his mind, refusing to become some base, mindless, blood-thirsty beast with no control or reason. It had worked, for the most part, until the first surviving, vengeful Death Eater had come knocking.

Like moths drawn to a flame, trouble always seemed to find him, and it never found him anything less than wrathful when it came. That had been his first real feed off of a person. Every time before then, he had been controlled, just like he had control over every aspect of his life since Lily's death. He usually fed on the unwary, the unsuspecting, the deserving, and the weak willed. He did that because he didn't want to waste the time and effort charming anyone else with his gaze or his bite. He found that he could, but he truly didn't care enough to do so. He had learned quickly that if he didn't wipe his targets minds after a feed, they would track him down and follow him around like thralls and beg to do things for him. He learned to find his feed for the evening, take enough of blood to curb the edge off his hunger, and wiped their minds as effectively as a memory charm.

At least it staved off his hunger, even though the blood tasted like ash in his mouth. There was no pleasure in it for him, even though his victims seemed more than willing to bear the other carotid oh so willingly, if only he would do them the honour of sinking fang into them again. Severus curled his lip in disgust at the thought.

The Death Eater, however, did not fare as well. Severus was all out of patience and chalk full of rage. He had descended upon his attacker the moment he had smelled the blood from Severus' _Sectumsempra_. He drank deeply from the Death Eater's neck, shaking the wizard's body to send his paralyzing touch down their body and keep him immobile, but the wizard wasn't fighting him anymore. Severus rolled his mind completely as he fed, took the man's head in his hands, and snapped his neck completely as he cast the body aside. A broken neck prevented the Change. Once you were Changed, however, death was hardly as easy.

Snape slammed his hand down on the ground next to the dead wizard, and the earth parted under the body and swallowed the body, pulling it under like a ripple on a lake.

'Well, that was new,' he had thought to himself as he regained his composure. One more ability he didn't realise he had. It wasn't like the idiot that had been responsible for his Change had been a good teacher. The moron had gone off and gotten himself immolated by a bunch of Aurors after being caught feeding on a child in Muggle London. Idiot.

Severus had done a lot of experimenting on his own since his Change. There were many things he learned about vampires that no one in academia seemed to know. Or, if they did know, they weren't publishing it.

Sunlight, he had found out, made him itch. He didn't burst into flames, turn to ash, or anything remotely dramatic. No, he itched. Even his bloody hair itched. It was insufferable. He ended up making himself a body butter and a leave in conditioner that eased the effects and tempered the few times he had to suffer through being about in the day time. It really did him a favour, really. Aurors seemed to think if you could be out in the sun for longer than a second without spontaneously combusting, you weren't a vampire. Goody on them.

Ironically, now that Severus was an honest-to-Merlin vampire, his students thought him a brooding war-hero who just hid away from publicity. The rumours of his being a vampire and a dungeon bat had completely disappeared. Considering he spend some of his nights drinking blood and hanging from the rafters as a large black bat, the irony was not lost on him.

He actually had less trouble with his students now that his once piercing gaze conveyed his will in a way his younger self would have probably killed for. Now, whenever he locked gazes with a dunderhead in his class and told them read the directions on the board, they would sort of glaze over and read the directions on the board. If anything, his unintentional discoveries working with highly charged, emotional children had tempered his vampiric powers without his realising it. He could control an entire room of emotional adolescents with various degrees of questionable willpower and intelligence with hardly a twitch of his finger. Adults were easy after dealing with children. Hogwarts really was good for something.

The door to the faculty lounge opened a crack and broke Severus out of his revere. A large eagle-owl fluttered into the lounge, knocked over a few candlesticks with the span of its wings, and landed with a tired hoot on Severus' extended arm.

The owl's huge talons sank into the flesh of his arm, but Severus felt no lingering pain. Wearing a gauntlet would have been for show, anyway. He healed too fast for it to be a real concern. He ran his pale hand over the owl's soft feathers, feeling the warmth of her body with each stroke of his hand.

"Rough day?" Severus whispered the question. His voice, rarely wasted on people, purred softly in the air.

The owl hooted, fanning her wings, and hopped onto his chest, digging her claws into the front of his doublet. Severus snorted, putting his arm around the disgruntled owl, knowing what she required. The owl hooted again, softer this time, and snuggled into his chest.

"I hope no one comes into the lounge any time soon," Severus grunted, "to witness this highly despicable unprofessional behaviour."

The owl gave an owlish snort, sounding almost human coming through her beak. He found he knew what she was thinking without trying too hard.

The owl was suddenly a curly-haired, black-clad witch. She leaned against him with a weary sigh, resting her head against his shoulder and invading his personal space with the tenacity of a cat seeking a sunbeam— that is if a sunbeam could be surly and vampiric.

Their bond as Master and Apprentice had not faded, even after all of the years she had been successfully been her own Master in right and deed. The aftermath of the second war had turned the once insufferable know-it-all into a hardened witch whose emotional guardedness was matched only by her Master's.

Minerva had matched them together, knowing that Severus wished to continue to teach DADA. She had come to a compromise. He could teach DADA in five years, after he had trained his replacement: Hermione Granger. He had started off training her begrudgingly, but she had proven herself in so many more ways than skill in potions.

She had been the first to risk her life for him, the first to know his secret, and the first to serve both as Apprentice and his Familiar. She had learned that he had become a vampire thanks to one stupid rogue Death Eater who believed killing Severus would make up for his life of murder, rape, and countless horrific deeds that he had done not for the Dark Lord, no, but for himself.

The Death Eater, in true Death Eater fashion, tried to get at Severus through his Apprentice. It might have worked, had the idiot not have cut Hermione. The smell of her blood had triggered something primal in him, and he lost control. He tore the Death Eater apart, ripping out his throat with his teeth and draining him dry. He had torn the man's head clear off his shoulders and flung it to the side as his mouth opened, his fangs bared, and he hissed inhumanly.

Sanity had returned only after the Death Eater was completely and irrevocably dead—sanity and the gut-twisting realisation that he had just murdered someone in full sight of his Apprentice in the most horrifically gruesome manner possible.

But when he fully expected her to flee from him, set him in a body bind, scream at him for murdering someone, or do something utterly understandable in the face of realising your Master was a vampire and just killed someone, Hermione had breathed a sigh of relief. She pulled on the solidity of their Master and Apprentice bond, felt the complexity of the emotions he was harboring, and clutched his robes like a child of five hanging on her parent's coat before sinking into his flabbergasted arms.

"Thank you," she had whispered, "for saving me, Master."

That had been the first time he had allowed himself to hold her close to him. She had wept into his robes as a surge of multiple emotions and memories filled her mind. So many near missed deaths by her from Death Eaters haunted her. The most recent one had been staved off by none other than Severus in pure vampiric fury. She had clung to him, not because he charmed her, entranced her, or otherwise rolled her mind, but because she believed in him.

Hermione hadn't known then that Severus was a vampire until that night. Perhaps she had suspected, but like so many others, saw him walk in the daylight without spontaneously combusting and thought herself insane. He had been careful, oh so very careful and controlled. He had always fed enough never to compromise his emotions and feed his more primal vampiric drives. Blood for him had never been about pleasure, after all. It tasted like ash. It was entirely about the feed. It was about survival.

It was for Hermione's survival, however, that he had encouraged his Apprentice to learn how to be an Animagus from Minerva.

-o-o-o-o-o-

"Very good, Professor Granger," Minerva laughed as Hermione tested out her new wings as she perched on the Headmistress' gauntlet-covered hand. "Your meditations are at an end, at last, my dear."

Hermione hooted an awkward reply, her amber eyes seemly whirling as she tried to gain her footing, balance, wings, dignity, and everything in between.

"Marvelous, Hermione," Minerva cooed. "Don't you think so, Severus?"

Snape stood in the shade of the castle, arms folded across his chest. "Glorious, Minerva," he said with a curl of his lip.

Privately, Severus was relieved. Animals such as owls did not invoke the hunger in him. As his Apprentice, he was bound to protect her, even from himself, and if Hermione could change into something that didn't scream prepackaged dinner, it gave him a sense of relief. He had, without either Hermione or Minerva realising it, encouraged the old Animagus to take Hermione underwing for that purpose.

"Go to Severus," Minerva said suddenly, and a flurry of barred wings came winging towards his face.

Severus hissed, putting up his arm to shield his face, and Hermione the owl landed awkwardly on his arm, her dagger-like talons digging into the softer flesh of his arm under his robes.

Hermione's eyes, which seemed a combination of the dark orange of the natural owl and a startling amber, met his, and he felt her apologies in her mind. He felt… her. His hand reached out to touch her feathers, gently running down the feathers of her head and wings, and he felt so jolt of something akin to pain in his chest. It was like he couldn't breathe. He felt a protectiveness rise within him as her loyalty, all of her blinding Gryffindor loyalty, transfer to him in a rush of heat, memories, and shared pain.

He saw the Weasley boy accusing her of sleeping with Potter and trudging off into the Forest of Dean. He saw her with her face in her hands after the Yule Ball after Ron had accused her of fraternizing with the enemy. He saw her saving her friends in the puzzles guarding the Philosopher's Stone. He felt her desperation as she saved Harry from Umbridge's torture, and her righteous anger as she allowed the Centaurs to drag the toad of a woman away. He saw the kiss between Ron and Hermione after destroying one of the Horcruxes, and he saw the phenomenal row that had broken them up when she chose Apprenticing to work at Hogwarts over starting a family with one Ronald Weasley. He saw the disenchanted Hermione Granger cleaning out her desk at the Ministry of Magic, having had her fill of politics in one life before she had even reached twenty five. And last, but not least of all the memories, he saw Hermione struggling against Ron as she was writhing, kicking, and screaming at him to let her go back and try to help the infamous git of the dungeons not bleed out to his death on the Shrieking Shack's floor.

 _"He was a right bastard to you, Hermione!" Ron yelled at her. "Let the traitor die!"_

 _"No!" Hermione wailed, clawing at him. "You can't just leave him there like that. You can't leave him to die alone!" Her voice cracked._

 _"Why do you care?" Ron said, dragging her away. "He's done nothing to deserve you running back in there. Help Harry! He's what matters!"_

 _Hermione sank her teeth into Ron's arm, causing him to yell and let her go. Hermione scrambled on the floor and ran off into the darkness, back to the Shack._

 _"And we would have been nothing without HIS help!" Hermione hissed back at him, disappearing into the night's gloom._

 _"'Mione!" Ron called after her, taking a step forward. "Get back… bloody insane witch!" Ron had turned and gone the opposite direction._

In Hermione's memories, Severus saw himself, sprawled under the nubile vampire who had drained what little had been left of his blood. Hermione screeched into the room, wand up, sending spell after spell after spell towards the vampire. The creature howled in pain as Hermione's rage powered her magic, and her magic was fury incarnate. It raged, it seethed, and it burned.

The vampire stumbled backwards, shrieking. He hissed, baring his fangs at her in pain and anger, but his anger was nothing. His anger was a drop of water in a vast ocean of searing wrath that Hermione had been holding back her entire career at Hogwarts. She drank in the vampire's pitiful anger, and then flooding her magic pathways with the endless sea of her own emotional fury.

Hermione's hair was writhing around her head like the snakes of Medusa. Her teeth were grit together, and her eyes were filled with fire so hot that they had gone completely white. "You. Will. Not. Have. Him!" Hermione hissed, every muscle taut as her magic crackled around her.

Hermione, this wrathful witch with a depth of rage that spanned the Pacific's depths, was a Hermione Severus had never seen. He felt the heat of her emotion spilling out over her skin like magma from a volcano. It poured off her body as her magic whipped around her. She reached out her hand to the vampire's body, and crushed her fingers together as if smashing something in her palm. The vampire screamed in agony, and she jutted her chin forward, eyes flashing, and he went flying out the Shack's wall like it was thin tissue paper.

Watching as a third party, Severus saw Hermione's expression switch from rage to despair. She rushed to his side, tears coming down her face in direct contrast to the merciless wrath she had just shown. She dug in her beaded bag, pulling a cork with her teeth and putting it to Severus' cold lips.

"Professor Snape," Hermione cried over him. "Professor!"

She had another vial which she poured on his neck, stopping the flow of blood. She poured another potion down his throat, stroking his neck to make him swallow it. She pulled out a vial of something, perhaps powdered bezoar. She tried to put it to his mouth, but seemed to realise that a powder was not going to get swallowed easily, even if he had been remotely ably to do it voluntarily.

Hermione took out a plastic bottle of water from her bag, cracked it open, and dumped the powder and shook the bottle. She took a drink from the bottle, made a face at the horrible taste of it, and put her mouth to his. She stroked his throat with her hand, forcing his muscles to swallow.

She repeated the action without hesitation. Once, twice, countless times more until the powdered bezoar was completely in his system. She breathed air into his lungs when he stopped breathing, and beat on his chest in the Muggle way, forcing his heart to beat and deliver both the potions and oxygen to his starving tissues.

Something was driving the witch with every fibre of her being to throw herself into saving the downed Potion Master, traitorous ex-Headmaster, and horrible human being that had been nothing but cruel to her every year of her Hogwarts career. It was something Severus could not fathom, understand, or even attempt to grasp.

"You can't die, Professor," Hermione said as she sank her weight into the chest compressions. "No more deaths," she whispered hoarsely. "No more deaths, I beg you."

Genuine tears were streaming down her face. Tears for him.

"You tried to save him," she gasped as she pounded on in. "Threw yourself in front of a raging werewolf, protected us— even when you hated us. Please, Professor!"

She kept up with the monotony and repetitive sets of compressions, and breathing into his lungs for him until he coughed, a ragged wheeze shuddering through his throat as he pumped air into his own lungs.

Severus saw himself staring into the face of Hermione Granger. He saw the confusion in his face and the wonder of the wrathful, stubborn witch that had refused to let him die.

She cradled him, her breaths coming hard and laboured as she pressed her forehead to his. "Thank Merlin," she whispered.

It hadn't mattered in the end. He had survived death only to succumb to the Change but a week or so after. The easily overlooked drops of vampire blood had condemned him from the moment it had touched his lips. It had just taken a bit longer thanks to how little he had been given. All her hard work had saved him just long enough to make the transition.

As Severus looked into the face of the owl that was Hermione after having shared the flood of her thoughts, he realised there was more than just the bond created between Master and Apprentice. She had saved his life. She had breathed life into him. She had pounded his heart to force it to beat.

It may not have been love, but love had never done him any favours before.

He had felt the tendrils of Hermione's mind seeking his— seeking his comfort, approval, and the warmth she knew he rarely ever let show on his face.. It was the start of the Familiar bond. It was something that should have only been possible between a wizard and… their true companion.

Severus had closed his eyes and let the bond swallow him up, letting his mentality take its final steps into the arms of the Abyss.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Severus touched Hermione's hair, the loose curls wove around his fingers like sentient tentacles, clinging to his skin like they were alive. Her eyes had drifted closed as she leaned into him. He felt her thoughts, fuzzy with sleep, thinking of nothing but the altogether ironic feel of safety she had next to her Master.

Safety next to a dangerous predator. Nothing was more contradictory. The lamb might as well be laying down with the lamb. The hungry, vampiric lion, that is—

Severus felt his teeth ache, and the shudder went through him. Damn his Needs. Damn its timing. Had it really been over a week since he last fed? He hissed instinctively, digging his growing talons into his palm as he force his controls into place.

Hermione stirred against him, her eyes looked up into his. "That time again?" she whispered sleepily.

Severus turned his head away, forcing himself not to look into her eyes.

Hermione's fingertips touched his chin, taking liberties with his person that no one had ever done before, and no one other than her would dare. "It's okay, Severus," she said softly. "It's a need, like any other need. There is no shame in it."

Severus looked into her face, pained. "It is when it has to be you."

Hermione snorted. "You'd what," she mused, "feel better if I was some random idiot on the street?"

Severus winced.

Hermione tsked. "Severus, you know how I feel about it. I know how you feel about it. Please, just, tell me what you need and it's yours. At least you know I haven't been shooting up drugs or taking some sort of hallucinatory potion that will cause you to see melted walls and dragons stuck in the mirrors."

Severus coughed a laugh, unable to keep his dour expression.

Hermione's fingers traced his chin. "See? There's that smile."

Severus' dark eyes met hers, and he smiled slightly, flashing fangs ever so briefly. "I need you," he confessed softly, barely a whisper. "I hunger for you."

Hermione pulled out her wand and gestured to the door of the faculty lounge, warding it closed. Practically no one but them ever used the lounge at this time of day, but knowing her kind of luck, the day she didn't ward the door, Professor Flitwick would wander in and have his toes curl up.

Hermione tugged at her collar, but barely had time to register that her wand hand was now pinned against the couch. Severus pinned her against the leather upholstery with a growl, his pupils becomes an even darker black than usual. His fangs bared as he breathed against the skin of her neck as he sensed the beating carotid of her lifesblood ever so close to the surface.

He cradled her, soothing back her hair as he pressed his mouth to her skin, rubbing his lips against the softness of her neck. Her scent, as always, was intoxicating. The bond between them was too strong for them to deny their mutual attraction. Even so, he would almost always fight the desire for her blood. A part of him felt he had no right to ask yet one more thing of her. She was his Apprentice, even so many years after their formal vow had been fulfilled. She was his colleague, his champion, his Familiar, and the only one that would unravel him with just the scent of her hair. Merlin forbid she get a paper cut and the scent of her blood practically drove him to invade her classroom, shove all of her students out the door, and have his way with her on the castle floor like some love-starved nymphomaniac.

He ran his claws down her spine, causing her to moan softly. He ran his fingers down her body, distracting her mind in a far more traditional manner than rolling her mind. It was always her choice to feed him. It had always been her choice. No one had known at the time what that one act of voluntary selflessness would do to him, and had they known, he was unsure if they would have done it. She was always a bloody Gryffindor, however, and that meant she would have probably done it anyway.

His jaw tightened, and his head tilted back, and he struck her neck like a viper. His fangs sank into her neck, seeking her carotid. His fangs withdrew quickly, and the blood rushed to the surface to feed him. His growl was primal, possessive, and needful. His arms wrapped around her like tentacles, pulling her to him.

Her blood was like firewhisky. It burned him as he drank, filling his body with warmth, and the taste was like ambrosia. While those he had hunted before her had blood that tasted like ash, hers was like nectar of the gods. It tasted like Life itself, and drinking it was akin making love to the only person that ever mattered, and perhaps he would not have been so wrong in the comparison. He forced himself to close the wound on Hermione's neck, gently licking his marks and whispering a soft spell that seemed more like a song. The mark of his fangs faded, leaving her skin flawless, and a part of him growled in annoyance.

Hermione's soft pants had caused ripples of a hundred kinds of desire to course through him, and he had to force himself to pull away and take no more. He didn't need more, he knew. He was sated, but he wanted more. He wanted to bask in her lifeforce. He wanted to share his blood and make their bond eternal. It was a need that was almost more powerful than starvation hunger— to make her his mate on top of all the other things she was already.

His hand was already in his mouth, his fangs ready, oh so ready, to pierce the skin of his alabaster hand and let the 'gift' flow from his veins into her mouth. It would only take one drink to insure her place at his side… and condemn her to a half semblance of life.

Severus pulled his hand away from his mouth, gritting his teeth together. He placed his palm to her face, drawing it across her cheek and her lips, relishing the feel of her tongue as it licked his palm with the small and significant sign of her affection.

He rocked her against him, forcing his fangs to recede and his mind to settle. She was asleep against him in a matter of minutes, the feeding having drained her of her energy just enough to push her over into sleep. Even now, she trusted him to stop when he was sated, to protect her from danger, and to be gentle to her even when the beast hungered for her. It wasn't as though she were unable to protect herself, no. It wasn't as if she was inept as a witch. She simply trusted him more than any human had ever done in his life before or after his Change.

 _"Lily" Severus pleaded. "Please, trust me! You need to get away! You need to hide! The Dark Lo—"_

 _"I don't trust you, Severus," Lily said sadly, pulling her baby to her chest as she stepped closer to James Potter. "My real friends will take care of me. The ones that matter. The ones who would protect me from you and your Death Eater friends."_

Severus winced, his face pressed into the scent of Hermione's hair. Hermione. His most precious Apprentice, his Familiar, his… one that mattered. He would protect her, cherish her, desire her at his side until his last breath.

Even if it meant he had to protect her from himself.

His hand was in his mouth, his fangs having sunk into the soft flesh of the side of his hand. He pulled his hand away, watching the blood gather in the freshly-made wound. It pooled and began to drip as he clenched his fist. He watched the large crimson droplet shudder and fall to the floor.

One drop was all that it had taken to both save and condemn Severus Snape.

He closed his eyes.

He was a fool think Hermione would ever wish to live a cursed existence with him. He had already asked too much of her. She was already bound to him as a Familiar. Wasn't that condemning her enough to put up with his rancor inside her head for the rest of her life? To be at his beck and call if he should so desire her assistance?

She could still find a younger wizard her age to share a normal life with. Hopefully that someone would protect her as he did, cherish her wit and her candour, adore her smile, and know that special spot under her elbow that always made her laugh even when she had spent the previous hour crying emotionally over the ending to a book.

It would happen, if he let it. He could force himself to go back to stalking wayward people to feed him. He could encourage her to go out and live life instead of spending her free time with with him as though she were still his Apprentice. He could shove the almost physical pain he felt when she left his side for longer than few hours into the recesses of his mind like he did every other painful memory he ever had.

He could it do it… for her.

As if she could sense his thoughts even her in sleep, Hermione's arm snaked around his doublet and she snuggled into his side, letting out a soft sigh of contentment that melted all of the resolve he had tried to gather.

Severus shuddered, and his arms pulled her close to him. He allowed his body to sag back on the couch as he enfolded her in his embrace. His eyes fluttered as the touch of his skin against hers sent a tremor of contentment through every nerve in his body, both settling and encouraging the beast that was his vampire nature to protect what was 'his.'

Severus had promised himself at the end of the Second Wizarding War that he would change for no one. He had sworn he would serve no other Master. As he snuggled into the warm witch that was sleeping against him, he wondered if being his own Master had only freed him of one kind of slavery and bound him to another.

"Hermione," Severus whispered to the sleeping witch.

Hermione stirred against him, murmuring softly, her hands clenching his doublet and part of his robes, snuggling into them. She blinked awake after a minute and shared into his eyes.

"The sun is finally down," he said, looking towards the dark window. "Would you like to fly with me?"

The bushy-haired witch yawned softly, sounding much like the hoot of her owlish self. "Of course, Severus," she said sleepily.

His smile was brief, and had Hermione not known what to look for or been quick enough, she would never have known it happened. She half-rolled off his stomach and pushed herself up, stretched, and was instantly an owl. She clawed for purchase on his shoulder and yawned a hoot into his ear.

The flight, he knew, would wake her up. It always did. She soared the night sky as the apex predator she was, second only, perhaps, to him, whose predatory nature was supplemented with preternatural abilities. She flied in her owl form with the stealth and grace she could never duplicate on a broom. Broom flight still terrified her.

Severus stroked her back and her wings with his pale hand. "I am glad you are here with me," he confessed.

Hermione turned her head around to look at him. She hooted, nibbling at his crooked nose with her beak affectionately.

He waved his wand to the door and unwarded it, walking towards it as it opened automatically for them to exit.

He walked out the door and down the hallway corridor, carrying Hermione on his shoulder as he often did. It felt natural to have her here, sharing his space so closely. At first he had just blamed it on her being an owl, then he blamed it on her being his Familiar, but he had slowly come to terms with the fact that it was Hermione being Hermione that made it significant.

Unlike her younger know-it-all swotty self, the older and more worldly Professor Granger was a quiet companion. She shared conversation with him when asked, and kept to herself when not. She read by herself, and she read with him. She had accepted his instruction as her Master and trusted his guidance without fail. Unlike her student self, she put her faith in the Master and Apprentice bond that just as it was her duty to learn for him and him to teach her, it was also her place to trust in his judgement. When she had succeeded in becoming an Animagus and subsequently ended up bound as his Familiar, she took it in stride. He had felt her relief and her worry that once her time with him "expired" that he would cast her aside like every other person that had tried to get close to him since after the war.

It had puzzled him that one such as her would desire his company. He was not a cheerful companion, prone to laughter, or overly comforting. He was about as talkative as one of the courtyard statues and often just as stoic in the face. Yet, Professor Granger absorbed every bit of what he could teach her about Potions down to the way he flicked his hand when he dropped in potion ingredients. By the time their Apprenticeship had come to an end, he could confidently say she knew every nuance of potion making she needed to be her own Master as well as quite a few in depth studies of DADA that he had thrown in just to make things interesting.

He had accompanied her to the Ministry to take her Mastery certifications, watched her receive her laurels around his Master pin on her collar, and had a celebratory coffee with her in downtown London surrounded in Muggles who couldn't stop staring at the two "odd people dressed in priestly robes."

He had fully expected her to assume her position as Potion Mistress of Hogwarts, take up her daily lesson plans, and not speak to him again short of the hello at the Head Table during meals and passing in the halls. It didn't happen that way.

Hermione would sit with him every morning, passing him tea or coffee just the way he liked it, and chatted with him as he nursed it, making it look like he was eating. She would surreptitiously poach things off his plate so it looked like he was eating it, making a game out of it when someone caught her.

"He wasn't eating his cucumbers fast enough," Hermione had scoffed at Flitwick as she stuffed a cucumber slice into her mouth.

The other professor had shaken his head in amusement, convinced that the Apprenticeship with Severus had broken her mind. Surely the old Potion Master would murder her for stealing off his plate. Severus had let them think what they wished. They always did.

As Severus walked down the path to Black Lake, Hermione balancing on his shoulder like it was her duty, he looked up at the fullness of the moon. He closed his eyes, nostrils flaring as he took in the scent of the night blooming flowers.

Hermione fluttered her wings as he jutted out his chin to tell her to fly, and she launched off his shoulder into the night sky. Severus' night vision saw the warmth of her body as she glided silently away from him, and had he not been a vampire, he would not have heard the beat of her wings at all.

Severus closed his eyes and leapt into the sky, assuming his bat-shape. His great membraneous wings catching the wind as he joined the owl in flight. The night was theirs, and he intended to enjoy every moment of it.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-

 **A/N** : I'm not sure what kind of crack someone slipped me this weekend, but, apparently, I was bitten by a vampire bat. Sorry about that!


End file.
